Culture

Cory Bernardi Endorsed Donald Trump And Wants The Liberal Party To Be More Like One Nation

It's so great we're paying him to hang out in America.

by Matilda Dixon-Smith  3 November 2016

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Cory Bernardi missed the memo: Halloween is over and no one likes scary stories about the rise of the extreme right. Bernardi, as you know, is Australia’s answer to the great philosophical question: What happens if an absolute numpty manages to nab a gig as senator? And he’s back in our lives, again, being embarrassing on a global stage. Again. And cripes, this one’s real bad.

Bernardi, who is on a secondment to the UN (this is what your tax dollars are paying for, PS), has spoken out in support of Trump and the global rise of “native conservatism” (read: white extremism). In an interview with Sky News, Bernardi called the US election a “referendum on Hillary Clinton”. Then, in his weekly newsletter from Camp UN, he alleged that in a binary choice Trump is “the least bad candidate”. Cory. Mate.

Bernadi’s solid-gold logic is this: “For every flaw that Donald Trump’s got, I think you can magnify for Hillary by two.” He also called Trump “deeply flawed” and “erratic” so, you know, go figure.

In the Sky News interview he insisted that he was “not a cheerleader for Donald Trump”, before he went on to cheer voraciously for Donald Trump in his weekly newsletter. “Next Tuesday, unlike most of my colleagues Down Under, I’ll be cheering on a Trump victory,” Bernardi crowed. “I hope there’ll be something to celebrate.”

All credit to Bernardi, though, he can read the political climate. He warned, “Whether [Trump] wins or not next Tuesday, I suspect the impact he has made on the political system here will be felt for a long time to come.” And, look, he might just be right. From the UK’s Brexit fuck-up, right over to the rise and rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation in our very own backyard, this new hyper-conservative xenophobic “Alt-Right” movement is mobilising a heck of a lot of dispossessed racists.

Bernardi then pivoted away from Trump to turn his attentions to the homeland, and the rise of Australia’s own extreme right. Here’s where it gets ~Halloween spooky~.

Bernardi, who told Sky News that he had warned Australia before about the rise of anti-establishment parties, has chosen to view the recent success of Hanson’s One Nation party as proof that his premonition is bang-on, and that he is essentially the Professor Trelawney of the Liberal Party.

He went on to call for the government to halve the migration intake and reconsider the refugee intake, lest the extreme right rise up still further and take down the Coalition for good. See? ~Spooky~.

He accredited his new Liberal Party Hostage Plan to “economics”, telling Sky News: “For all the palaver we’ve been told that a big migration program is good for our economic growth, the statistics, when you look at them on a per capita basis, do not support that.

“What we should be doing is halving our migration intake, making sure it is acting in Australia’s interests in the long term,” he concluded.

Bernardi is, of course, completely wrong. Recent economic data from the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia suggests that doubling the migration impact would have major benefits for the Australian economy. But, you know, good try, mate.

Nothing like an outburst from yer mate Cory Bernardi to brighten your Thursday, eh?